The next phase

The initial round of funding from ARDC for LDaCA and ATAP ended in June. ARDC have submitted a Research Infrastructure Investment Plan (otherwise known as the RIIP) covering the period through to 2028, but further funding for LDaCA has been approved for the coming financial year through to end of June 2024 while we await the outcome of the RIIP2023 application.

LDaCA Director Prof Michael Haugh. Image ARDC/Marc Grimwade

Language materials at Batchelor College, NT. Image: Ben Foley

Community Connect project

LDaCA has recently been successful in gaining funding under ARDC’s Community Connect program which aims to make data more accessible to communities (researchers or others). Through a co-design process in the second part of this year (2023), we will develop a training workshop and associated materials to provide Indigenous language workers and community members with the knowledge and skills to use our data portal effectively and to find the data in which they are interested. The co-design process will involve the participants in the University of Queensland’s Winter Language Revitalisation Intensive Workshop as well as discussion sessions at both the Australian Languages Workshop (July 21-23) and the Puliima Conference (August 21-25) where our team members, led by Robert McLellan, will explore ways of breaking down the jargon which is comfortable for academics but which can be a barrier for others. On the basis of the knowledge gained in these activities, the team will then develop the workshop and training materials. Initial delivery of a workshop will occur in November.
 

The Language Revitalisation program at UQ involves Samantha Disbray, Des Crump and Robert McLellan (also LDaCA’s Program Manager). On the LDaCA side, our Engagement lead, Simon Musgrave, will coordinate the project, and we are delighted that Otis Carmichael (our logo designer) will join the team.

Catherine Travis and Li Nguyen convened a workshop on Language Corpora in Australia (Canberra and online, July 3). The link to the program and abstracts can be found here.

Peter Sefton and Simon Musgrave participated in the 2nd Workshop on Digital Language Archives (LangArc-2023, June 30). The title of their talk was "A CARE- and FAIR-Ready Distributed Access Control System for Human-Created Data", available as part of the workshop proceedings.

Martin Schweinberger and Michael Haugh were part of the local organising team for the 7th conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English in Brisbane (June 19-23). The conference included a workshop on ATAP tools (Simon Musgrave, Sam Hames, Ben Foley, Chao Sun) which gave keen participants a broad overview of the project, and a wonderful introduction to LADAL (Martin Schweinberger).

Peter Sefton attended the Open Repositories conference in Stellenbosch (South Africa, June 12-15). He gave a presentation (Towards a Generic Research Data Commons: A highly scalable standard-based repository framework for Language and other Humanities data); A version of the presentation is published on the LDaCA blog. He also demonstrated the LDaCA software stack and this generated a great deal of interest from the conference attendees.

Chao Sun ran a workshop introducing Juxtorpus, recently developed at Sydney Informatics Hub (Sydney, May 25). Juxtorpus is a tool for splitting a corpus using various metadata parameters and then carrying out simple comparisons of the resulting sub-corpora.

Moises Sacal Bonequi is a Senior Software Developer in our team. His top tip for researchers is to think ahead: “From the beginning of your project, think about your intentions. Do I plan to share this data? Is it even my data to share? What would be the repercussions of sharing? And what might be the benefits? Will it validate my research, is it important to the rest of the world?"

Moises grew up and studied in Mexico. He has lived in Australia 11 years and has worked on a number of research infrastructure projects.

LDaCA Senior Software Developer Moises Sacal Bonequi. Image: Moises Sacal Bonequi

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